Southern Riverina Gliding Club E - News Edition 4 February 3, 2010

SRGC JUNIORS GLIDING DAY
SATURDAY FEBRUARY 6, 2010
This will be our first Junior Gliding Day for 2010. Please meet at the Hangar at 11am for a weather briefing by Ingo Renner. The Gliders will then be taken out onto the aerodrome before taking a short break for lunch and commencement of flying in the afternoon.

FLIGHTS:
This week was yet another fairly busy week here at Tocumwal. There was quite a few training flights done during this week and yet another new member for the Southern Riverina Gliding Club. We would like to welcome our newest member Mr Fernando Salazar.

Fernando has had a long association with Tocumwal having a long history of gliding at Sportavia when it was in business. He has commenced a refresher course today with Ingo Renner as his first steps towards flying his newest acquisition Glider VH - GIN a 2 seater Caproni A21 which he will be keeping here at Tocumwal.

Fernando flew a primary glider in 1947 - "your first flight was also your first solo as there were no 2 seaters." This was in Mont Florite in Spain. He was in the Spanish Air Force and learnt to fly many German aeroplanes such as the Junker and Henkel. He continued to fly gliders until he came to Australia.
In 1952 Fernando was a tow pilot at the World Gliding Championships in Madrid, Spain. Fernando has lived in Australia for 50 years and has been a lecturer of history at the Australian National University and Monash University. He is now retired and is presently building a Minimoa with Malcolm Bennett and was the owner of the Kestrel VS at Sportavia. We expect to see quite a bit more of our Spanish friend and his family on the aerodrome in the future.

OTHER MEMBER NEWS:
The first flight in Australia of the ASW17 "Special" imported from the USA by SRGC Member George Schuit was test flown by Ingo Renner on the 20th of January 2010 and Ingo found it to be a good performing, nice handling glider, working wave to 8500 feet during the flight.

The Special started as a standard 17 meter span ASW17, but in 1981 was modified by the Schleicher factory and the Americam owner by increasing its span to 23 meters. This was to done to make the glider more competitive at a time when the German manufacturers were not producing a comparable glider. Performance is over 1:50 so George certainly has a nice toy to play with.